Customer Reviews

Outer Limits: It Crawled Out of Woodwork [VHS]

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"His name is Warren Edgar Morley. For the past six months, he has guarded this gate from eight in the morning until six at night, at which time he is replaced by another just like himself. These are the last few moments of his life." At NORCO (energy research commission) a cleaning woman accidentally creates an energy cloud monster. The head of NORCO decide to study and use the monster in order to control his staff research with the help of pace-maker boxes. Don't miss the fantastic opening scene with the cleaning woman. Pre-"The Invaders" Kent Smith, as Germanic Dr. Block, is really terrifying ("Some people are long time dying."). There is a famous shot of Kent Smith, with the close-up of his turning hand, saying : "Not insane... at worst, obsessed." And finally, his pro-Adam bomb statement : "The wonderful questions are always answered at the cost of human life. Remember how we wondered about the atom bomb." The look of the long corridor that leads to the pit is scary. The extreme close-up, shot with a wide-angle, of Ed Asner's sinister face, watching the energy monster, is totally weird. This is the perfect example of a typical episode made with Joseph Stefano's taut writing, Gerd Oswald's Caligari-like direction and Conrad Hall's somber photography. Please watch "Production and decay of strange particles" with this one. "The Conservation of Energy Law-a principle which states that energy can be changed in form but that it cannot be either created or destroyed. And this is true of all energy-the energy of genius, of madness, of the heart, of the atom. And so it must be lived with. It must be controlled, channeled for good, held isolated from evil, and somehow lived with, peaceably."

Joe Stefano scripted this nightmarish horror offering. His scripts are often short on logic, this one particularly, but make up for that failing by being long on unsettling or downright frightening imagery. And the imagery in this one is downright frightening.

The "it" of the title is an impossible energy force, explosively brought into existence by an accident involving a vacuum cleaner at an energy plant. How exactly this occurs is never pondered, since frankly it doesn't matter - any more than it matters how a mad scientist can so skillfully control and use the thing to terrify employees to death, and then resurrect them with pacemakers in order to create fully complient slaves.

What matters is the theme and the imagery, and those convey themselves most effectively in this scary little sci-fi thriller. Ed Asner does an early pre-Lou Grant turn as the police inspector unfortunately drawn into a murder investigation at the plant. Michael Forest gets to chew the scenery quite delightfully in two (count 'em, two) death scenes. Joan Lamden is a convincing tortured soul. Scott Marlowe and Barbara Luna are wasted as young lovers in a subplot that exists only to provide the suspicious death report to Asner that furthers the plot and yawningly pads the episode. Kent Smith gloriously chews more scenery than Michael Forest in either of his death scenes, as the mad German scientist (is there any other kind?) responsible for all the mayhem.

The title of this Outer Limits episode is said to be taken from a cleaning woman who unwittingly gives life to a strobing growling chaotic cloud of lethal energy, that resembles the power from The Man with the Power episode. Directed by Gerd Oswald and written by series producer Joseph Stefano, the treatment is schizophrenic since it divides our time between Norco, the energy research commission which is attempting to break or change the Conservation of Energy Law, headed by a Bela Lugosi accented Kent Smith, and the apartment of brothers Michael Forest and Scott Marlowe, without a conclusion that brings the halves together satisfactorily. There is an inconsistency in what constitutes research which may be attributable to Smith's state of mind, since although he has contained the Id-like atomic force in a multiple sealed chamber known as The Pit, which has self-contained power generators, the Pit is also used as a spider's web where victims are lured to feed the cloud. While Oswald goes in for expressionist close-ups, with a notable extreme long shot of the lab as the energy passes through it, Stefano's teleplay is written in a literary style that draws attention to itself. Whilst this may be preferable to the sci fi gobbledegook that can intellectualy alienate (no pun intended) the viewer, it sometimes reads as static naval-gazing, with a rememberance of a childhood trauma bordering on psychobabble. A description of a woman as being beautiful is clearly innaccurate but rationalised by the speaker having a "misplaced sense of word value", there is a repeated reference to an female's legs which may categorise Stephano as a legman, and an odd line presumably an in-joke of it's time "If he'd been in any better health, they'd have given him a morning show on television". Oswald doesn't make much of the cardiac pacemakers that are strapped to the chests of the inhabitants of Norco, except when he begins a scene with a bath being run to create an expectation. He upstages a dialogue scene between the brothers with stripes of reflected light over their faces, has a funny cut from a description of someone's smile to the same person's tortured face, a cut using the verbal reaction to "police headquarters", and composer Dominic Frontiere uses a harp, as well as his ascending scale once again. Intentional or not, the brothers are Stephano look-alikes, and also use Sinatra smooth talking voices. Marlow would be used as the playboy in the future Forms of Things Unknown episode, and while he is given a girlfriend (the one with the legs), his manner also suggests bisexuality. As a detective Ed Asner gets some unusual for him action scenes, which he gives a nice lack of hysteria panic to, and understates amusingly "Are you insane?!".

Steven Kings favorite episode, need I say more

This is the eleventh episode in the series, and though I don't think that it is one of the best, it does have its moments.

At the Norco Energy Research Commission, the cleaning lady uses her vacuum cleaner to suck a gooey object from the ground. Once it goes in the vacuum, the vacuum cleaner starts shaking and explodes, releasing a form of pure energy that kills anything in its way. Now, Stuart Peters (played by Michael Forest) is a new employee at Narco, and is made to work with Dr. Stephanie Linden (played by Joan Camden), to discover a method to create or destroy energy. Dr. Linden sends Stuart through a passageway and exposes him to the energy. We see Stuart dead, but after a while, he comes back to life to see his brother Jory (played by Scott Marlowe) and tells him to run away. Later, he (Stuart) is electrocuted in the bathroom due to an accident. Jory is confused and tells Det. Sgt. Siroleo (played by Ed Asner) the details. Det. Sgt. Siroleo now tries to get the whole story behind the murder investigation by interrogating the workers of Narco.

The one thing I really liked about this episode was the idea of man trying to destroy pure energy (and including a murder mystery somewhere as well). The idea also talks about man controlling energy, giving him a sense of power (which can lead to madness). But, it is a very sensitive topic and, unfortunately the writers did not emphasize much on the storyline. If energy can neither be created nor destroyed, then how did it get created in the beginning of the episode in the vacuum cleaner (of all things!)? And if it WAS created, shouldn't there have been a way that it was destroyed in the end? And HOW was that thing able to come out of the facility and kill Warren Edgar Morley (played by Gene Darfler), the security guard, in broad daylight and then somehow go back inside?? It just doesn't make any sense. I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but compared to the other episodes of the Outer Limit series, this one raised far too many questions to make it completely believable.

Of course, the cast acted amazingly as usual especially Ed Asner, Scott Marlowe, Kent Smith and Joan Camden.

To quote Vic Perrin (The Control Voice): "The Conservation of Energy Law: a principle which states that energy can be changed in form, but that it cannot be either created or destroyed, and this is true of all energy; The energy of the genius, of madness, of the heart, of the atom. And so it must be lived with, it must be controlled, channeled for good, held isolated from evil, and somehow lived with peaceably."

If you can get by the story of how the "energy creature" was created after a cleaning lady used a vaccum on a dustball, then this is not that bad of an episode (and the creation is really not that important). The wacko doctor manipulates his staff toward where his "creature" is kept, so that it can feed on their energy and help it's survival. Eventually, too many people get involved and the cops get the word, which leads to the ending confrontation, in which "all the beans are spilled." The episode's creature looks like the "cloud" from "The Man With The Power." The episode has solid acting and a nice wierdness to it.

thank you for your time, David

Although he receives no billing in the opening credits, Ed Asner as a police detective walks away with the acting honors in this most unusual entry in the 60's anthology series. His "Sgt. Cirrolio" is a no-nonsense cop who must get to the bottom of the mysterious goings-on at NORCO. Lovely Barbara Luna provides great support as the love interest for star Scott Marlowe while Steve Forrest, as Marlowe's brother, does adequately as a scientist who makes a faulty employment choice. He would memorably appear a few years later as "Apollo" in the classic Star Trek episode " Who Mourns For Adonis?"

Overall, this is one of the most intriguing episodes of the series with excellent music from composer Dominic Frontiere

One of the pleasures of watching episodes of "The Outer Limits" is that you get to see actors before they became famous as a consequence of future roles. In this case, Ed Asner portrays a police officer investigating the mysterious death of a scientist. Research at a top secret energy lab has created a powerful creature made up of energy. The creature is kept locked up and in ways that are not explained, it is capable of killing people, but it is possible to revive them and keep them alive via some kind of pacemaker device that they wear on a belt.
The director of the lab is only a slightly bizarre take on the "mad scientist" character; he keeps people alive via the pacemakers and has the resultant delusions of godhood. Asner is called in when the brother of a bit of a playboy is hired at the lab, is immediately killed to be compliant, but then truly dies in the apartment he shares with his brother when his pacemaker is shorted out. Asner observes the energy creature, but is rescued before it can kill him. The episode ends with the creature recaptured amid a nebulous moral about the dangers of experimentation with atomic energy.
If you understand history, then the fears of atomic energy expressed in this episode will make sense to you. The 1950's and 1960's were a time of great fear of atomic energy, when I was growing up in those years we were told not to eat icicles because of the dangers of atomic fallout and we practiced "duck and cover" on a regular basis in school. My teen-age daughter finds it very odd that we had regular drills where all the kids rolled up on the floor with our hands covering the backs of our heads. That is no doubt a metaphor for how people that do not understand the history will react to the fears expressed in this episode